ART products - pretty snazzy

Received my PowerMIX III in the mail today. This is the third ART item I've acquired, and I'm very pleased by the quality. They're inexpensive, but they have sturdy metal cases and they have several products for untangling the audio messes I seem to keep creating for myself.

I don't know whether they're studio quality internally - I'm no pro - but they're kickass hobbyist gear.

Just thought I'd share my thoughts.

You need to put down the credit card and back away slowly, is what I think. Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang, man.

No RLY, the mixer was only like 80 bux!

I'm a big fan of hobbyist gear myself.

Maybe one day I'll use something from Neve and be ruined forever...

I used to have a Tube MP- made my CX3 sound better. I much prefer it over the often-used Presonus BlueTube (except as a mic pre). Now I use a Speakeasy pre which IMO is better still- but should be ($$). Works pretty good with my Electro II rack.

PS all the above devices are way cool with blues harp, if you don't have tube guitar amp for that purpose.

By the way, I have an ART stereo tube preamp in my rack that I put some Phillips 12AT7 tubes in. It doesn't sound as good as my dbx 586 tube preamp but it's pretty nice for some applications like synths and bass.

I have an ART Dual Tube EQ and its freakin' great. I use it everywhere - guitar and bass rigs, recording,etc.

I have the TubePAC. It sounds about as clean as the mens room at the San Francisco Trans Bay bus terminal. Nothing beats it for that "homeless, naked and dying from cheap heroin" sound.

love that sound

The early reverbs - Multiverbs, Proverbs - weren't exactly stellar products. Know why sell for peanuts on the 'bay? They were muddy sounding reverbs and they would distort in the digital domain even though the levels are not clipping on the front end.

Yeah! -- gives really great tone color for not so many clams.

Just watch Don and whitepapagold come into this thread and tell us we have no idea what we are doing

To me the art stuff muddies up the sound, rather than warming it up. For a line mixer it's fine, but the starved plate tube preamps are not my favorites. But they do have their place, and I certainly wouldn't bash anyone for using them. I would say to listen with and without them in the chain and make sure you like the sound they are imparting.

-D

DLP, I don't recall seeing that you've given us your thoughts on the Mono... Curious minds want to know!

Oh, so far so good! I really need to spend an evening pondering the manual before I really get all tingly over it. It seems suited to making lo-res computer tones, which is what turned me on about the thing in the first place - I'm a big fan of chiptunes, and none of my other gear really wants to go in that direction. It's a great partner to the Voyager, in fact.

I need to figure out MIDI clock stuff - I have no clue - I'm hoping I can get the Motif to set the tempo of the Mono, and make magical things happen.

In fact, I'm going to go mess around with it now.

Should be easy. Anything modern with tempo-based parameters should have a setting in it somewhere to sync to external MIDI clock. You may have to tell the Motif to *send* a MIDI clock, sometimes they default sending of clock to OFF so as not to confuse newbies.

For instance, I have my TI synced to MIDI clock from Sonar. Works as advertised.

DLP, you can also get warmer sounds from the Elektrons. Just respect the headroom. It's a bigger issue on the MD, because its default machine volume is maxed out, rather than half, as in the MnM. A lot of people get frustrated by the subtle digital distortion on the MD kicks, for example, because they don't realize that they are smacking the headroom with each trigger by having the main, track, and machine volumes all set to max. If you find you want to peel way back on the digital character of the machine, try turning down the individual machine's volume a bit.

The manual is pretty good, worth studying a couple times.

OMG! Just like you said, EP - I set the Mono to external sync, and now it's following the Motif's tempo change! That's ninja-secks-cool.

AR - thanks for the tip - I'll try to remember that.

I have an ART Tube MP, it's so fuzzy it's kind of funny. Should be called the ART 'Tooobs sound warm, man'.

Trey Gunn's tone has not been as good since he abandoned the SGX processor.

I don't know about the microphone input -- I bought the Tube MP to bring my guitar signal up to a level the Motif XS would handle for sampling. I think it sounds great.

I don't know about the microphone input -- I bought the Tube MP to bring my guitar signal up to a level the Motif XS would handle for sampling. I think it sounds great.

Guitars sound good with a bit of fuzz on them.

You don't have to tell that to a former guitarist

My only experience with ART gear was with an ART SGE Mach II back in 1990.

Simply put, a POS.

The Alesis QuadraVerb Plus I also had at the time blew it away. But then the Alesis QuadraVerb was humbled by the Yamaha SPX900 I had.

Ah, memories.

cheers,

Ian

It does! In mono mode its 8 band parametric and highly adjustable...perfect in the series loop of my guitar amp. Works great between synths and PC too...